Arrested Development: Season 4 (Initial Thoughts)

Now the story of a hilarious TV series that lost everything, and the one streaming service that had no choice but to keep them all together...

2003 was a magical year. Enjoying my first year of college, making new friends and embracing the anarchy of living in the dorm.

There were also a couple of pimply-faced freshman on the TV scene in 2003. A documentary-style comedy about this... paper company in Scranton, PA? Awkwardly offbeat, but almost instantly addictive. I remember watching the first 2-3 episodes every single night after we discovered the show. Then when the next episode came out we added it to the rotation.

But this post is about Arrested Development.

I first heard about this Fox series in May/June of 2003. At that point the first season may have been just finishing, I can't remember. The first couple of episodes didn't really wow me like The Office. But it was summer time and I had nothing else to watch. So I soldiered on. By episode 8 or so I was totally hooked. The Bluth family had won me over with their absurdity, pomposity and Tobias Funke's unforgettable lines. An aside: everyone I've recommended this show to has elevated it to one of their all-time favorites immediately after a specific Tobias line. So hilariously perfect.

I'm not sure if Arrested Development is the perfect example of a cult TV series, or the perfect example of how Fox arbitrarily picks winners and losers among their shows. I think it was bounced around a few different time slots before eventually biting the dust in the third season. I was among the pissed off heartbroken masses that sailed into the sunset with the Bluth family, bought the entire series on DVD and watch it at least once a year and still laugh just as hard as the first time.

We'd all heard the rumors of an Arrested Development movie for so long that it seemed too good to be true. Every cast member would withhold denial of the movie so perfectly that it kept us all tantalized. But it was an unbelievable revelation to hear a fourth season was in production and would be released all at once on Netflix! After a year or so of anticipation I plopped down on my couch last Sunday to partake in the next chapter of this hilarious story.

Disclaimer: I'm only about six episodes in.

It's Arrested Development and all your favorite characters are back... At least I think they are... They have yet to all be in the same place at the same time. It feels like their schedules didn't allow the entire cast to physically be in the same place at the same time. The series picks up as though quite a bit of time has passed since season 3, which is probably a good choice. But it also makes the characters a bit more difficult to understand/predict. It's like watching the series for the first time again. Maybe by episode 8 I'll be loving it again, but for now it's like we're trying to get to know each other again, easing into jokes and themes.

It's not all doom and gloom. I've been laughing out loud. I'm loving the cameos in this season. There are TONS. A couple of the new characters are hilarious enough to help make up for the lack of power performances by the old standbys. They've even new ways to mix up the regular cast in some fun and unexpected ways. I'll say this too, they've done a great job of not incorporating every single joke and reference into the first couple episodes (although I could have used a couple more).

I went into season 4 of Arrested Development with astronomical expectations. In hindsight I should have approached it like season 1. I'm going to try and be a little more patient and impassive with the rest of this season and let it reveal itself to me. Then maybe it will all seem much funnier on the second (or eighth) time through...

Flashy New Flickr

I do a lot more posting about photography on another blog, but I think this news has enough crossover to make it worthwhile here. Plus, this is generally where I post reviews. Plus plus I haven't posted here in a while. Plus plus plus you really should be on Flickr.

I hadn't heard anything about Flickr making an updates to their site, so I was surprised when I logged in earlier today and was greeted with a blacktastic welcome screen. Did I type the URL wrong? No... those are my photos...

So let's backtrack. Flickr is probably best described as a social photography site. Lumping it in as social networking seem so limiting though. Let's backtrack again. I'll list some of the features/uses for Flickr (in the order I utilize them) and hopefully explain how Flickr is more than a photo Facebook.

1. Host and archive your images. In photography (especially digital photography) there's a saying: "If it doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist." If your photo is on your memory card it could be lost, damaged, corrupted or stolen. If it's on your computer hard drive the same risks apply. But there's also a saying that goes, "Once something is online it can never truly disappear." Flickr is an (admittedly poor) option to help with that. Throw your photos on Flickr and they're in the cloud. You can access them anywhere with an internet connection. With a free Flickr account you can host up to 200 photos, and with a paid account (something like $20 per year) you can have unlimited storage. That being said, I cannot imagine the amount of mourning and gnashing of teeth I would display if I was forced to recover the 4,000ish photos (a fraction of my total image library) one at a time via Flickr. But it's better than nothing.
2. Sharing images in other places. Like this:
   
   That from someone who doesn't know a thing about HTML. Luckily Flickr automatically produces code for various sizes of your photos that you can copy and paste anywhere. It also has integrated tools to share your images directly to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Blogger (hey, that's this!). 
3. Get Social. Ok, so now we're starting to get to social aspects of Flickr. You can find and friend other Flickr users. Then their new shots will always appear on your home page. You can also join Flickr groups based on camera, area of interest, geographic region and virtually any other factor you can think of. These groups have pools for sharing photos and discussion boards for learning all kinds of information. Some feature challenges/themes/contests to keep you inspired. 
4. Get Geeky. So Flickr captures and utilizes all the EXIF data from your shots. What's EXIF data? Your camera saves all kinds of information in your image files. The type of camera you use, the lens, all the settings... you can even set your name and copyright info to go in automatically. This helps you learn more about the shots you like, from your own photo stream and from others. You can use this information to deconstruct their shots and figure out how to apply the principles yourself. 
5. EXPLORE. You'll want to make sure you have hours of free time before clicking on Flickr's Explore link. The mystical wizards at Flickr have come up with a magic algorithm that ranks the interestingness of photos based on number of views, favorites and comments. Each day the 100(?) most popular images get populated into the Explore page pool. You can get lost for hours pouring over the beauty and brilliance that's displayed here. But wait, there's more! You can search for photos on a map of the world (some cameras also save the location where photos were taken, or you can manually place them on a map). Talk about vacation planning potential! You can also do camera research by exploring by camera and looking at images others have taken.

So back to the update. I've been on Flickr since 2007. During that time the site has stayed pretty much the same. Boringly functional (my words). I personally kinda like that. I still have a LiveJounrnal and have opted out of the updates that have been applied since I started my account in 2001. I'm reluctant to change. But I'm super excited about Flickr's changes. The smooth black interface and automatic tiling of photos feels really good. And it seems like almost every photo looks better against a black background anyways. The look is a little more Facebooky, but it's tolerable. It looks like there's still some kinks to work out, but I'm pretty confident in giving my thumbs up to the new Flickr.